By: Mustapha Abdullahi
President Buhari: Atiku Bagudu will be in the driver’s seat to navigate the country out of this malaise Â
There is no doubt that current Kebbi state Governor Atiku Bagudu has become the cynosure of all eyes as far as what will most likely become of him in a post-Buhari government’s scheme of things. The fact that he has his eyes set for the seat of a Senator in the forthcoming general elections has not stopped pundits from making a mountain out of what should ordinarily have been a settled matter. Ideally, the expectations that he will become a Senator should have settled all permutations.
This seeming interest in what will become of him has its origin from the out-of-this world relevance he has been able to garner in the eight years of the Buhari administration. That he was, since 2019, the Chairman of the influential APC Governors Forum appeared to be just the icing on the cake of a stellar career as a politician of note in the country.
That he has become central to the realization of the Buhari administration’s food security objectives, despite his very tight schedules of being a Governor and an ad-hoc resort of sort in various key national assignments, seemed not to have been lost on those who watchdog him.
One of the key priorities of the Buhari administration at its onset was to produce the food we eat and put a stop to the dangerous over reliance on especially rice importation which had, for many years, eaten deep into our foreign reserves and thus made us 100% dependent on food from ashore. The idea was to encourage local rice production especially, in view of the availability of the potentials in arable land and manpower to achieve it.
Governor Atiku Bagudu became the man the President had turned to, to navigate a way out of the quagmire of our over-dependence on foreign rice. He made him the Chairman of the Presidential Task Force on Rice and Wheat Production. This way, the President had made it clear that Atiku Bagudu will be in the driver’s seat to navigate the country out of this malaise. When the President appointed the Governor again as the Vice Chairman of the National Food Security Council which the President incidentally chaired, all doubts as to who was the Boss of a national revival program were erased. Atiku Bagudu was the egghead to marshal out implementable policies to get the country out of the woods. And he did a good job of it, as attested to by the President himself at different fora and by different layers of stakeholders including the drivers of the ambitious Anchor Borrowers Initiative – a funding policy which provided loan facilities to farmers under an arrangement to deal with the red tapes which had, all this while, constituted a clog in the wheel of the nation’s match towards sustainable food security. The reduction in the way the country commits huge foreign currency to import rice pointed to the fact that Atiku Bagudu and his team have indeed delivered, ditto for the local production of the rice we eat in the country as well as the beginning of export to neighboring countries.
Of course, we are still not where we wanted to be. The efforts the Atiku Bagudu team has put into its assignment was not meant to, overnight, take us to the promised land where rice will just become readily available. But we must acknowledge that for the very first time, Nigeria has kick started a genuine and patriotic journey to self sufficiency in rice production.
So, what is our guess as to what the future likely holds for the Kebbi state Governor post 2023? The Presidential Candidate of the APC Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu – the leading candidate for the office of the President and Command-In-Chief, has already given us a glimpse. His appointment of Atiku Bagudu as the Chairman of the Committee on agricultural development of his Presidential Campaign Council is a glimpse enough to prepare the minds of the people of Kebbi state to the fact that our Governor is Kebbi’s best hope in the future administration of the country. It indicates that Kebbi will remain the bastion of hope and food security hub of Nigeria.
With these tangible expectations, every right thinking Kebbian should gird his loins to cast his vote to actualize Bagudu’s dream of becoming the Senator of Kebbi Central because doing this takes Kebbi closer to capping itself as Nigeria’s destination for the resolution of the national food question.
